Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Jonathan Flatley) Harvard University Press 2008

          Adorno's ideas about "aesthetic shudder"   in Aesthetic Theory, esp. 244-245, 269, 331.

  p.80-81 The affective mapping function is achieved by means of the noncoincidence of two moments in the experience of what, following Adorno, we might call "the work of art," so long as we mean that phrase in a fairly broad sense. On the one hand, one has a perceptual and cognitive apprehension of the artwork in its otherness, which has certain effects...
On the other hand, but simultaneously, one has an affective response in this other world defined by the work. The artwork provides both the context and the objects affects need in order to come into existence...... (transferential one)   ... (b)y creating a kind of mood atmosphere with its own objects, artworks bring affects into existence in forms and in relation to objects that otherwise might not exist.
... In an important sense, we never experience an affect for the first time; every affect contains within it an archive of its previous objects.

p.82 So, for example, here I am at a concert of the Emerson String Quartet; they are playing one of Beethoven's late string quarters. .... I shudder. According to Adorno, such a shudder is generated not by the emotion evoked itself but by the transition from this emotion— experienced in this world of the quarter, that is to say, a world that bears no apparent referential relation to the world of everyday life— back to my subjectivity as I experience it in everyday life. At the moment of this return from the work, one has the sensation that one has just been temporarily dislocated from one's subjectivity. This is because one has, from a moment, has an affect in a space not defined by one's subjectivity, and then one is returned to that subjectivity, reminding one precisely of that subjectivity, and its limitedness. The return to the "self," the subjectivity as we find it in our everyday lives, and its disjuncture with the affects and the mood we have experienced without a self, in a nonself, is what produces, for Adorno, the shudder.
(also a self-estrangement and defamiliarization of one's own emotional life)
p.83  I am not quite sure what Adorno means by "the other" here, but I take him to be referencing a moment of apprehending the basically plural nature of one's emotional life. The work is something like a meeting place for an affective collectivity.

p 84 if an affective map is a representation of one's affective life in its historicity, then this representation works in the following way. The moment of shudder is a reaction to the simultaneous rupture and connection between the affective experience one has within the world created by the work on the one hand and the affective attachments one has within the world of everyday life on the other. I this way the shudder opens up the space of self-estrangement that is necessary to get a distance on one's affects. It also puts one into contact with others, a contact that is imaginary in one sense. But inasmuch as it is based on the shared historicity of that affective life, it is quite real.

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